Key takeaways
- Taken from the clifftop path, not from the sand or the water.
- Two openings in one low headland, often called the M or the eyes.
- A pocket of sand between cliffs, reached by a long flight of steps.
- Because the whole cliff face is only visible from the water.
What it is
Praia da Marinha is a small beach on the Lagoa coast, a short way west of Benagil, tucked into a break in a cliff wall that runs unbroken for kilometres either side of it.
It is not large. A pocket of pale sand backed by layered gold and cream limestone, with clear shallow water in front of it and rock formations standing just offshore. There is a car park at the top, a long flight of steps down, and nothing else.
It turns up on lists of the best beaches in Europe with monotonous regularity, and the reputation is not manufactured. It is a genuinely beautiful piece of coast, and it is beautiful in a way that photographs unusually well.
It is also one of the fixed points on this cruise, and the reason it is worth its own page is that almost nobody arriving by boat recognises it from the photographs they have seen.
The name simply means the navy or maritime beach, and like a great many Portuguese coastal names it records use rather than beauty. This was working coast long before it was photogenic coast.
The arch, and why you have seen it from above
The formation everyone knows is a low rocky headland immediately east of the beach with two openings cut through it, so that from the right angle it reads as two arches side by side. It gets called the twin arch, the M, or the eyes, depending on who is talking.
The photograph that made it famous is taken looking down from the clifftop path. From up there the two openings are visible at once, the water shows turquoise through both of them, and the whole thing sits neatly in a frame.
From a boat you cannot get that view, and that is the single thing worth knowing before you arrive. You are below the formation rather than above it, so you see it in profile, in three dimensions, with the sea running through it.
Which is better is a matter of taste. The clifftop photograph is the famous one; the view from the water is the one that tells you how big it is.
A twin arch standing off a cliff beach
How it looks from the sea
Approaching by boat, the beach appears as a gap. The cliff wall runs on and on, unbroken, sixty metres of layered rock, and then there is a notch of pale sand with people on it and cliffs closing in again immediately afterwards.
That framing is the thing the clifftop view cannot give you. You see how small the beach is relative to the coast it interrupts, and you see the whole face of the cliffs above it rather than the top few metres.
Up close, the rock is full of detail: caves at the waterline, overhangs, undercuts where the sea has quarried the base and left the upper face standing, and the colour bands running horizontally through all of it.
The offshore formations separate out as you pass them. From above they read as a flat pattern. From the water they are individual towers and arches with space between them and the sea moving through.
Landing, and why this trip does not
The beach is reachable from land, and if you want to stand on the sand at Praia da Marinha the way to do it is to drive to the clifftop car park and walk down the steps.
This cruise does not land there. It passes and it stops, which is the normal arrangement for boat trips on this coast: the beaches are small, the approaches are shallow and rocky, and the point of a boat is the perspective rather than the landing.
In high season the beach is busy, sometimes very busy, and the clifftop parking fills early. Anybody planning a land visit should treat early morning as the only comfortable option.
From a boat, none of that applies. You are looking at the beach rather than competing for a space on it, which on a coast this popular is a real argument for seeing it from the water.
From above
The famous Praia da Marinha photograph is taken from the clifftop path. From a boat you get the opposite view, which is the one that shows the scale.
What is around it
Praia da Marinha is one of the anchors of the finest stretch of this coastline, and the ground either side of it is as good as the beach itself.
East towards Benagil the cliffs are continuous and riddled: caves at sea level, arches through headlands, stacks standing offshore, and the Algar itself a short run further on.
West, the same rock continues towards Carvoeiro and the sequence repeats. Nothing about this coast is a single highlight with dead ground between; it is the same processes producing the same features over and over for kilometres.
On land, a clifftop trail runs along the top of it and is one of the better coastal walks in Portugal. From the boat you will see people on it, small figures against the sky, which is a good reminder of how high the cliffs actually are.
It is also the point on the run where most people stop taking wide shots and start taking details. There is more to look at per hundred metres here than anywhere else on the coast, and the temptation is to photograph all of it at once, which never works.
